Weekend Edition: January 22, 2016

I was deeply moved by this story—what a picture of pain and forgiveness.

Most people know me as a New Testament scholar. To keep my reading of Scripture balanced, however, I do most of my devotions from the Old Testament. Indeed, I have encountered God especially deeply in prophetic books such as Hosea and Jeremiah, where God laments over his people who have wandered far from him. God intended for his people to have an intimate relationship with him, a covenant relationship that the Bible compares with marriage.

In Hosea, we hear God’s broken heart, his longing for his covenant people, who were so often unfaithful to him. And they actually turned against him, the very one who helped them (Hos. 13:9). God later lamented through the prophet Jeremiah, “My people have committed two wrongs: They abandoned me, the spring of flowing waters, and have dug out for themselves water pits—broken water pits that cannot hold water” (Jer. 2:13).

Yet God, even in his anger, remained faithful to Israel. In his jealous love, God declared that he would strip them of what they valued, the gifts they wrongly attributed to false gods, so they could learn to depend solely on him (Hos. 2:8–13).

For many the term “strategy” sounds very unspiritual and not something a ministry leader should be concerned with. After all, when you read the Bible, you will not find a verse that encourages pastors to be strategists, nor will you find “strategic” listed in the qualifications of a pastor. A church needs godly, biblical, Spirit-filled leadership much, much more than a church needs strategic leadership. Spiritual leadership must trump strategic leadership.

But a church can benefit from both spiritual and strategic leadership. The latter must not overpower the former, but the two are not mutually exclusive.

When a ministry leader leads well, the ministry leader will give strategic direction (even if a different term is used). Leadership is embedded in the very definition of what it means to be a pastor, a shepherd of God’s people. Shepherds lead the sheep. The apostle Paul instructed the pastors in Ephesus to “be on guard for yourselves and for all the flock that the Holy Spirit has appointed you to as overseers, to shepherd the church of God” (Acts 20:28). In his letter to Titus, he called the overseer “God’s administrator” (Titus 1:7). The apostle Peter encouraged the elders to “shepherd God’s flock among you, not overseeing out of compulsion but freely” (1 Peter 5:2). In other words, both Paul and Peter saw a tight connection between shepherding and overseeing.

Lauren and I have been married 16 years. I must admit that those first few years were tough. I had an over-romanticized view of what marriage was and what I thought Lauren and our marriage would bring to my life. There was a confidence I should’ve been gaining from the Lord. But I was, instead, trying to gain it from Lauren. When she was unable to heal all the brokenness in my heart, I began to blame her. I had convinced myself that the problem in our marriage was Lauren. I was constantly on the lookout for evidence to support my theory.

I remember one Saturday morning, Lauren had frustrated me again and she knew it. But, she came around from our bar area and just hugged me. She said, “I’m not sure what’s going on in your heart. But I want you to know that I love you.” For whatever reason that moment of her expressing grace to me broke me. I remember thinking for the first time in that moment, “I’m the problem.” The root of the problem was that I had a distorted view of what marriage was. By God’s grace, Lauren and I discovered that because our understanding of marriage had been broken, the way we utilized it was be broken.

Everyone wants to know what evangelicals think — particularly in the election season. But who are researchers talking about when they refer to evangelicals? In Today’s Conversation with Leith Anderson, Ed Stetzer talks about the challenges and opportunities in defining and researching evangelicals.
In this podcast, you’ll hear insight from a leading Christian researcher on:

The different ways researchers identify evangelicals;
How to define evangelicals by their beliefs;
The statistical realities of how evangelicals vote;
and What the future looks like for evangelicalism in the United States.

An important list, dominated by Muslim-majority nations, of nations where it is hard to be a Christian.

2014 was the world's worst year for the persecution of Christians in the modern era. Until 2015 surpassed it.

The 2016 World Watch List (WWL) from Open Doors analyzes how African countries now outnumber Mideast countries on the list, affecting far more Christians numerically (though not as severely). Christian martyrdoms and destruction of churches nearly doubled during the "Year of Fear," yet only 4 of the top 10 persecuting countries rank among the 10 most violent ones. Meanwhile, the spread in severity among top persecutors shrank by half, and five countries that would have qualified for last year's list did not make this year's list because the minimum threshold of persecution is up 50 percent since 2014.

The annual list studies pressures on private, family, community, national, and churchareas of life, plus levels of violence, in order to rank the top 50 countries where "Christians face the most persecution." [Full list below.]

"Open Doors USA predicted that while Christians faced the worst persecution in modern history in 2014, the worst was yet to come," the organization stated. "The prediction was sadly fulfilled in 2015—the persecution of Christians increased on every continent."